Samuel Coleridge: 10

A heavy burden of guilt that becomes an obstacle to success, as in The failed real estate scheme became an albatross around her neck, for now she could not interest other investors in a new project. This idiom comes from Samuel Coleridge's narrative poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), which is based on the widespread superstition that it is unlucky to kill this large white sea bird. In the poem a sailor does kill an albatross, and when the ship then is becalmed near the equator and runs out of water, his shipmates blame him and force him to wear the dead bird around his neck.

www.answers.com/topic/albatross-around-one-s-neck

Paco Rabanne: 9

Apart from his dress designs and line of fragrances, Rabanne also has an interest in paranormal phenomena, and became infamous for his false prediction of the Russian space station Mir falling to Paris in 1999. Some media referred satirically this episode as "Pacolypse".


Mentioned in the Star (johannesburg) article in "book of the week" Yhe year 1000 by lacy and Danziger - in 2000

Rodulfus Glaber: 8

"Especially significant is his treatment of the end of the first millennium. He is the primary source for claims of widespread fear and divine omens (famines and eclipses) anticipating the end of the world. Nineteenth-century historians relying too heavily on this one monk of ill repute popularised the notion that the people of the late tenth century lived in superstitious fear of nonevents."

Wikipedia.

...Sure there were prophets of doom, like the monk Rodulfus Glaber, who had the unpleasant experience of having the devil appear at the end of his bed several times, 'a shaggy, black, hunched up figure with pinched nostrils, a goats beard and blubbery lips'. But few people listened to his predictions and he was shown the door of monasteries across France. (The Star - Johannesburg 2000: Book of the week - The year 1000 by Robert Lacy & Danny Danziger)